Stories of the Beautiful Narratives of East–West Interchange at the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery Lee Glazer Complex networks of East–West interchange and cross-cultural encoun- ters—what Cynthia Mills, in her introduction to this volume, describes as “dynamic international relationships”—have played a defining role in the formation and development of the Smithsonian Institution’s art museums generally, but perhaps most especially at the Freer Gallery of Art where, as the marketing department once proclaimed, “America meets Asia.”1 When the Freer, the first art museum of the Smithsonian, opened to the public in 1923, it was also one of the first American museums to exhibit Asian objects in an aesthetic rather than ethnographic context, juxtapos- ing them with a select group of contemporary American paintings. As the historian Steven Conn has noted, the Freer posited “a fundamental aes- thetic connection” between past and present, East and West that was based on a cosmopolitan ideal of “sameness, commonality, and especially cultural cross-fertilization.”2 Indeed, when the museum’s founder, Detroit industrialist Charles Lang Freer, offered his collection of Asian antiquities and American art of the Aesthetic Movement to the nation in 1904, he explained to Smithsonian Secretary Samuel P. Langley that in spite of their diversity, his artistic holdings were part of an interconnected series constituting a harmonious aesthetic totality. Like James McNeill Whistler, the expatri- ate American who encouraged Freer’s interest in the arts of Asia, Freer believed that the aesthetic harmonies he discerned among the objects in his collection were evidence of a transcendent, timeless, and univer- sally valid “story of the beautiful.” Riffing on Whistler’s conclusion to the “Ten O’Clock” lecture that “the story of the beautiful is already 217 complete—hewn in the marbles of the Parthenon—and broidered, with the birds, upon the fan of Hokusai,” Freer told Langley, “My great desire has been to unite modern work with masterpieces of certain periods of high civilization harmonious in spiritual suggestion, having the power to broaden aesthetic cul- ture and the grace to elevate the human mind.”3 Because he thought his collection was best understood and appreciated as a totality, Freer placed a number of restrictions on his bequest, including prohibiting future additions to his American holdings. Recognizing that many new discoveries were still to be made in the field of Asian art and archaeology, however, Freer added a codicil to his will allowing for the occasional acquisition of “very fine examples of Oriental, Egyptian and Near Eastern fine arts.”4 As a result of the tremendous growth of the Freer’s Asian collections over the years and with the opening of the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in 1987 (to which the Freer is joined architecturally, through an underground gallery space, and administratively, through a shared staff), the Freer’s focus has shifted away from its founder’s emphasis on transhistorical aesthetic commonalities. Despite some significant differences between the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in terms of their respective collections and visitor experiences, the two museums are now known, in the shorthand of in- stitutional branding, as “the Smithsonian’s museums of Asian art.” Collections and staff are mostly organized around geographical and cultural areas—China, Japan, Korea, India and the Himalayas, Southeast Asia, the Islamic world, the ancient Near East, America—underscoring cultural differences as well as aesthetic distinctions. Successive generations of curators have contributed to richly documented accounts of the Freer’s masterpieces and the institution’s history and have organized impor- tant exhibitions encompassing a wide range of Asian geography and art history. A survey of those accomplishments is beyond the scope of this essay; the interested reader can consult the museum website at www.asia.si.edu to search collections on- line, learn about past exhibitions and publications, and explore the finding aids for archival and bibliographic materials. Rather than attempting a comprehensive consideration of resources at the Fre- er Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, then, this essay will describe and comment on a small selection of materials related to the idea of cosmopolitanism on which the Freer Gallery of Art was founded. The intention is to situate Freer’s collecting narrative within a more specific context of cross-cultural import-export. These more complicated narratives are not necessarily linear and certainly not te- leological; they are meant to be understood as sketches, cross-cultural vignettes that might be useful and thought-provoking to teachers, students, and scholars on both sides of the Pacific. 218 East–West Interchanges in American Art “Mr. Whistler Does Unite the Art” Freer’s transformation from capitalist to connoisseur can be dated to 1887, the year he bought a set of Whistler etchings—his first works by the artist—from Frederick Keppel in New York City. That same year he purchased a small Japa- nese fan from Takayangi To-zo-, a Japanese art dealer with a shop on Fifth Avenue. In 1892 he returned to To-zo-’s establishment and bought his first Asian ceramic, an Edo-period Satsuma water jar whose underglaze design, inspired by Chinese ink painting, reminded Freer of a Whistlerian landscape.5 “Collecting comes to mean collecting precisely when a series of haphazard purchases or gifts suddenly become a meaningful sequence,” Mieke Bal has noted.6 Freer established a master narrative—one based on East–West correspondences—early in his collecting ca- reer, and Whistler was clearly destined to be the hero of the story. Following their first meeting in London in 1890, the two men developed a close relationship based on mutual esteem and benefit. Whistler not only facilitated Freer’s acquisition of “a fine collection of Whistlers!!—perhaps The collection,” as he promised his patron in 1899, he also encouraged Freer’s burgeoning interest in comparative collecting, urging him to travel East and seek out rare specimens of Asian art to complement his own work. Writing in 1904 to fellow collector John Gellatly (whose contribu- tions to the Smithsonian are discussed by Amelia Goerlitz in this book), Freer noted, “Throughout the entire range of Whistler’s art . one feels the exercise of spiritual influences similar to those of the masters of Chinese and Japanese. Of course,” Freer concluded, “Mr. Whistler does unite the art of the Occident with that of the Orient.”7 Both in terms of his stylistic influences and subsequent relationship with a promi- nent collector of Asian art, Whistler is perhaps more closely associated with Asia—or, more accurately, with China and Japan—than any other nineteenth-century Western painter. Because of the close connection between artist and patron, the Freer’s Whis- tler holdings are the most comprehensive of any collection in the world: 130 paint- ings, 946 prints, 174 drawings, and the Peacock Room, as well as a wealth of archival and bibliographic materials, including the Paul Marks book collection, which was donated to the museum library in 2003.8 Whistler’s artistic debt to Asian sources has been thoroughly documented in scholarly literature and museum exhibitions, which have established the ways in which the artist first appropriated, and then more fully synthesized, motifs and pictorial structures from a variety of Chinese and Japanese sources, including porcelain, prints, lacquer, and textiles. This aspect of Whistler’s career is well represented in the Freer, most famously, perhaps, in the Peacock Room, which Whistler compared to a Japanese lacquer box. It was designed to display Kangxi blue-and-white porcelain and Whistler’s own homage to East Asian decorative arts, Stories of the Beautiful 219 1. James McNeill Whistler, Harmony in Blue and Gold: The Peacock Room, showing La Princesse du pays de la porcelaine 1 (1863–65), 1876–77. Oil paint and gold leaf on canvas, leather, and wood, overall: 166 × 241 ⁄2 × 404 in. Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, Gift of Charles Lang Freer. La Princesse du pays de la porcelaine, which features the Anglo-Greek beauty Christina Spartali in Japanese robes in an eclectically oriental setting (Figure 1).9 After purchasing the room in 1904 and reassembling it in his Detroit home, Freer, who didn’t care for the slick surfaces or bright colors of Kangxi blue-and- white porcelain, filled its shelves with more than 200 examples of his own collec- tion of Asian ceramics whose textured, tonally subtle glazes harmonized with his collection of American tonalist painting. Some of these vessels, from China, Japan, Korea, Iran, Syria, and elsewhere, were purchased during Freer’s Asian travels, while others were acquired from dealers in New York and Europe. In 1908 he commis- sioned a photographer to document the room, and those images demonstrate the way in which he freely mixed objects from various cultures and cultural epochs, more concerned with their chromatic relationship to one another and the decora- tion of the Peacock Room than with their historical origins (which, in any event, were often inaccurately understood, as subsequent reattributions attest). Freer as- siduously documented all of his purchases, and his personal papers, particularly letters to and from dealers and collectors of Asian and American art, provide a fas- cinating record of the international art market at the turn of the last century. Later, when the Peacock Room was removed from Detroit and reinstalled in the museum in Washington, it was located at the southeast corner of the building, creating a literal link between the Whistler galleries and those rooms dedicated to the arts of 220 East–West Interchanges in American Art China. Registrarial records, gallery plans, photographs, and diaries document the changing array of Asian and American ceramics presided over by Whistler’s Princess since 1923.